About 45 years ago, I bought an orange lawn mower at a garage sale held in the parking lot of Kinney’s shoe store in the Alief area (Southwest Houston). It was as basic of a gas-powered lawn mower as you could find. It was old, rebuilt, repainted, and, most importantly, cheap. As a self-employed writer-photographer-newlywed with a suburban yard to take care of, the mower was a perfect purchase for me. I believe it set me back 10 or 20 bucks, but the money went to a good cause because the garage sale benefitted the Alief Track Club, which I coached for both track and field, and cross-country. Everyone should have and remember their orange lawn mower times.
My mom and dad would grin at the notion of “orange lawn mower days.” They had the “one can of beans” days. They married during the Great Depression. I recall the story my mom shared about when they, as newlyweds, lived in an apartment over a garage, as I recall. They were down to one can of beans in the pantry when their landlord knocked on the door. The kind woman understood my parents’ situation and had prepared a full meal for them. Mom said that they were able to eat that night because of the woman’s kindness.
Challenging times shape us as we conform ourselves to face and conquer the difficulty at hand; those times are interesting and they hold a special place in our mental notebook full of memories. They leave signposts, reminders of periods in our life’s journey, often better examined from the distance of time rather than in the closeness of the moment in which they are occurring.
By the time I came around almost 20 years later, I think that mom looked at a full larder differently because of her stark memories of the day when hers contained only one can of beans. All of us look at objects, actions and events through the compound lens of objects, actions and events from the past. “Now” looks like it does to us because of the “then” that we have lived.
When I pause and think of the orange lawnmower, I consider some of my realities of then – young, still pretty fast on the track, enthusiastic, short on money, 70 pounds lighter, and excited about life and all that was to come, which turned out to include three sons, six grandchildren, a roller coaster for a career path, times of famine and times of feast, and a multitude of times of being victor and of being vanquished. In other words, life happened.
The orange lawn mower represents a time that included people I no longer know, but they are responsible for many great memories; a community that I was once a very active member of, but I haven’t been back to in more than 25 years; a period where my knowledge far exceeded my wisdom, and I actually knew very little I came to find out over time. Such is life.
Orange lawn mower years are good years and great teachers.